Road story

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Winner of last year's $20,000 Vogel Prize - which includes
publication by Allen and Unwin - Road Story is a slight but
strong debut from Julienne van Loon, a creative writing teacher at
Curtin University in Perth.

At 19, Diana Kooper is a girl with a past. She was just a kid
when she took flight from her small town and alcoholic mother with
her best friend Nicole.

A few years later and a lot of water under the bridge, Di
abandons the car she has crashed, leaving Nic for dead early one
rainy morning in Sydney. This time Di runs back along her past,
catching trains and hitching rides through the country towns of her
childhood before coming to rest in the far west of NSW.

Getting off a bus on a whim, Di is struck by a place described
as "a collection of tired old Monopoly houses". Owned and run by
Bob, a man with a gambling heart, it is an isolated and proudly
anti-tourist truck stop. Di becomes the kitchen hand, begins a
weekly affair with one of the drivers and settles into a routine,
which is less about living and more a powerful sense of limbo.

As she waits, and serves, and stacks, in the dusty diesel-choked
loneliness, the story of Di and Nicole slowly unravels. Using
flashbacks we see the long ago burgeoning of a schoolgirl
friendship, the giggly impromptu dash to Sydney and Nicole's spiral
into drugs and a destructive relationship. Di is gradually
sidelined as she tries to maintain her small bedsit in Kings Cross,
her pub job and her place in TAFE. These insights combine to build
a compelling picture of the events leading to the accident.

In the meantime things are becoming complicated at the truck
stop. Bob's luck has run dry, he hasn't paid Di's wages in months
and some of the truckies are more twitchy than usual. When Bob's
favourite dog is killed, shortly before he has a suspicious car
accident, Di "has the odd sensation that she's stepped into the
wrong story. This was supposed to be the plot in which girl runs
away and finds herself and lives happily ever after. And quietly.
Not girl runs away and gets dragged into someone else's drug
racket, someone else's crime plot, someone else's bullshit." She
couldn't be more right.

With an odd insight, Di has summed up in these few sentences the
novel's main weakness. The gritty and dark world that the author
hints at lacks a tangible sense of threat that would give it
credibility. And the whole gangster-biker theme feels undercooked
and somewhat distracting from the main plot. When the police
arrive, not to bust Bob, but to serve Di a summons for the accident
back in Sydney, it all feels disappointingly flat. As does Di's
discovery of Nicole's fate and her decision, once again, to
run.

There is much to admire in this novel. The sense of a girl
between places - literally and metaphorically. The weightlessness
of her displacement as she struggles between country and city, girl
and woman, from ordinary to potentially criminal, is extremely well
handled. As is the monotony and comfort in the work at Bob's
place.

Di is an interesting character, held at arm's length so we
remain detached from her, even as we sympathise. And the energy and
care put into each sentence is obvious and impressive.

However, while the restraint the author shows in her material is
admirable, ultimately the novel lacks a certain dramatic tension
that might have made it truly fly.